Xfce panel's "quit" button not working correctly; logout is also delayed...

...among other things.

Basically I've got four big problems here:

1: The Xfce panel's "Quit" action button doesn't work correctly anymore. It used to provide all the logout options (i.e. logout, shutdown, restart, etc.), but now it just pops up a dialog that asks "Exit Xfce Panel?" with a "Cancel" and "Quit" button. If I hit "Quit", the panel is gone, but the desktop stays, and all my keyboard shortcuts still work. (It kills xfce4-panel, but doesn't do anything else)

2: When logging out via Xfce_menu->Log Out, it delays for about a couple seconds before it actually logs me out/shuts down/whatever. It didn't used to do this; it used to be immediate.

3: If I run anything with gksu, a) it takes forever to get a password prompt, and b) one CPU core goes to 100%, taken up by dbus-daemon. Killing it of course kills X altogether (X<->DBus).

4: This one is somewhat unrelated, but still of rather large importance IMO: I totally screwed my partitioning up when I installed this Arch system (wasn't paying attention) and ended up allocating the better part of my 500 GiB hard disk to my /home partition, leaving / with just under 8 GiB. Now I'm paying the price: I can't install anything, and even pacman has complained that it can't retrieve the package list (for an update) because there's "no more space left on [the] device". :(

I've searched Google for solutions to all of these problems, and haven't really found anything useful. :( The only one that might be solvable (at least without directly asking questions) is the partitioning screw-up. I really hope I can fix that without having to re-install and re-configure everything. I've got everything just the way I want it on this machine, and I'm not sure if I'd be able to set it all up correctly again.

I honestly don't know what the deal is with any of these problems. My initial hypothesis was that it's because the / partition is now so full that some configs got lost and/or changed somehow. Now, I'm not so sure what the big problem is. I suppose in the meantime I can try finding a decent way of resizing my / and /home partitions without re-installing everything so that I can do updates and install additional SW if I need/want to.

RockDoctor

09-01-2010 05:31 AM

Regarding your partition problem: boot from any live CD or USB flash drive that has Gparted on it, and use Gparted to resize your partitions

MrCode

09-01-2010 05:49 AM

Quote:

boot from any live CD or USB flash drive (...) and use Gparted to resize your partitions

I had thought about that, and I'm just wondering if it's safe? (I know, stupid question, right? :rolleyes:)

But seriously, what's the risk of losing data? I mean, I'll back up first, but even so, I'd rather not have to go to the trouble of restoring from it. I suppose as long as I leave a little extra room for more stuff in /home, then I should be fine.

EDIT: Okay, maybe I'm not backing up...the only USB external hard drive I has is advertised at 160 GB, which I'm pretty sure is more like 15x GiB, and my /home partition (according to du -h /home) is 153 GiB in size. There's already plenty of stuff on that drive, which can be moved to my desktop machine's internal 320 GB drive, but even then I'm not sure if an image of my /home partition would fit on it (I was just gonna dd it).

dixiedancer

09-01-2010 08:07 AM

If you right-click on that troublesome Logout button and select Properties, you might find that it directs you to some Xfce setting thingy rather than to the Logout. You can edit those properties (and it's pretty self-explanatory) to fix that.

-Robin

MrCode

09-01-2010 08:25 AM

Quote:

If you right-click on that troublesome Logout button and select Properties, you might find that it directs you to some Xfce setting thingy rather than to the Logout.

Already tried, and it doesn't fix anything by changing the options there. If I right-click it and hit "Properties" I get a small config dialog where I can change the button's function between "Quit", "Lock screen", and "Quit + Lock screen". Changing it to "Lock screen" or "Quit + Lock screen" does no good.

Maybe I just suck at hand-configuring Xfce...I had a hell of a time getting Compiz to start automatically with it (had to dig around in the main config XMLs). I really don't understand what went wrong; it was working fine until I discovered that my / partition is full (the hard way), which leads me to believe that was the main cause, and something got screwed up in the configs.

MrCode

09-02-2010 05:59 AM

Apparently resizing the partitions was all I needed to do; I stuck a Linux Mint LiveCD in (it has GParted), resized the partitions to something a little more sane (:rolleyes:), and on rebooting, everything works the way it used to! :D